Cloud environments today are large and diverse, comprising many types of resources, e.g., servers, virtual servers, switches, storage, routers, etc. These resources need to be monitored and managed effectively. To that end, optimal placement, removal, and configuration of monitoring agents is crucial to proper maintenance and upkeep of resources within a cloud network. Monitoring agents are in widespread use to monitor infrastructure, software, packaged applications, etc., across a network. Typical monitoring agents are not plug-n-play products and in large-scale deployments, configuration and manageability of the agent itself becomes very difficult. For example, a large cloud network system may involve a plurality of resources, requiring an administrator with extensive knowledge of agents to manually configure and deploy agents to cloud resources. This strenuous process takes not only copious amounts of time, but also extensive knowledge of monitoring agent behavior, deployment, placement, and configuration based on the needs of those resources and specific capability of agents for the purpose.